abstrakt: Fear not, for you are not alone
in your shell scheming. In fact, I recently came across
scsh, or the Scheme
Shell, which was designed specifically for such a thing.
;-)

I also remember hearing mention of a project called
guile-scsh, with the intent of using Guile as the back end
for a Scheme Shell (I believe, though I'm not certain, based
on the project mentioned above).

It seems that whatever was messing with the certification
levels has been fixed, and I'm no longer an observer. I
guess there goes my excuse for putting off some pathetic
attempts at a few articles, so expect to see those posted in
a day or so. My thanks to whoever fixed the bug. ;-)

School...

The worst thing about school is when you have to do both
sides of it. Dead week is next week, which means that
finals will immediately follow. That leaves me with just
over a week to read a combined total of around 20 chapters
of various texts. Fun, fun, fun.

I also have to sit down sometime in the next day or so and
grade tests for the computer class that I teach. More fun.
I wonder if I could get some kind of assistant to grade them
for me....unfortunately, though, I don't think they give
assistants to part time professors at community colleges.
Oh, well.

Fun Time...

Putting another hour or two into playing with Scheme later,
I think. I'm really getting into this language. It plays
with your head in that nice way, although it does seem to
lead to headaches after prolonged exposure.

Books...

I'm currently in the process of compiling a list of links to
any and all online books that I can find. I'm primarily
looking for full text online, free, published books. I've
currently got around 16 links, and another dozen or two
tutorials and references. If anyone knows of any, please
post 'em here, or e-mail me at 'topher at zyp.org'. I'll
post the full listing in a couple weeks, when I feel like
it's closer to completion. I'm especially looking for less
well known books, as I have the more publicized recent ones,
like the Samba book and Open Sources.

My main focus right now is technical books, but I'll include
links to novels, as well, if anyone knows of any. Perhaps
with some help, I could get enough books to justify
organizing them into some sort of catagories.

Entertainment...

I'm thinking of going out to see a movie tonight or tomorrow
with a couple of friends. Anyone have any suggestions or
oppinions on what's good in theaters right now?

Also, I rented "New Rose Hotel" last night,
although I haven't watched it yet. It's based on a short
story by William Gibson. Anyone seen it, have anything to
say? I'm not sure what to thinka bout it, yet. I love
Gibson's novels, but the only other movie I've seen based on
one of his books, Johnny Mnemonic, was a bit dissapointing.
I actually did like the movie, although I know a lot of
people didn't, but I felt like it had a ton of potential
that went unrealized. I look at what it could have been,
and I see something like the "Matrix". Oh, well. "New Rose
Hotel" does have Christopher Walken in it, and he's just
plain cool, so maybe I'll give it a shot later. I'll prolly
post my thoughts on it after I see it.

Today, I was appointed to a position on my School's
Student
Government....and I beat out 7 other applicants for
it....only thing, is it was pending approval from the
student senate....

The problem is, the runner up candidate happened to
be a
member of the senate....which means he got to talk while I
was out of the room during the debate about my
appointment....

And, being on Senate, everyone there knows
him....while
less
than a dozen of them know me.

Result: Proof that it's not what you know, but who
you
know.

Further proof is in the fact that while I could have
handled
the position entirely on my own, immediately after the
meeting, the person who got the position came up to me and
asked me to be his assistant because there were aspects of
it he couldn't do.

I got slammed for my 'possible' lack of PR
experience
(as a
CS major, they weren't sure about it, so basically just
assumed it was nonexistent) while he can barely turn on a
computer....

The position is Legislative and Public Relations
Director,
and one of the primary jobs is the Student Government
website...

So, instead of choosing someone with unknown PR
skills,
they
chose someone with well known non-existent computer
skills....

I'm just annoyed at the whole thing, especially the
fact
that since I'm not on senate, I never got to say a word,
just sit there, while my opponent got to talk and comment
the whole time.

I just really wish I would have at least had a
chance to
speak and defend myself....it's tough when you're competing
against someone everyone there knows, and you don't have a
real chance to tell them what you can do.

"It's not what you know, it's who you know."

I'm just not sure if I even want to bother
now....there's
another position open that has pretty much been given to me,
if I want it....

I don't know how well I'd like working with people
knowing
that they play politics as much as they do...

It was funny, my appointment was about the only one
that
involved a person not already on senate...

And mine was the only one that the discussion lasted
for
more than 2 minutes (literally, including the time to count
votes) on.

Everyone on senate who was up for approval of their
appointment got it without disucssion, mine was debated for
a half hour (without me there to defend myself) and then
struck down in favor of one of the people who was on senate
and could speak against me.....Ugh. I just don't know if I
want to bother with it....

Hrm....it seems that I'm still stuck at 'Observer' despite
being certified above that...it wouldn't bother me much,
except that I'd been considering posting an article. Oh,
well, I guess it'll just have to wait...

Distro Wars, distro wars, let's all play in the
distro
wars....

I was gonna write up a big oppinion piece on the different
Linux Distributions, but then I realized that I didn't care
to write it, and no one would care to read it, either.

I think we all just need to remember that fanaticism in any
form is a Bad Thing (tm). Personally, I've never seen much
in the way of Debian users bashing Red Hat. In fact, my
experience has been that Debian tends to be one of the
'quietest' distros around.

It reminds me somewhat of NetBSD, among the *BSDs. FreeBSD
pushes themselves fairly strongly, and they work actively to
promote themselves and their OS. OpenBSD pushes themselves
as the most secure OS (Personally I feel administration is a
*much* more important factor, and consider OpenBSD to be
more Hype than real, but that's just my oppinion, and not
the topic I'm discussing here).

NetBSD, on the other hand, just runs. In fact, it runs on
more hardware platforms than any other OS. But, most
people, even those who've heard of Linux, FreeBSD, and even
OpenBSD, don't know about NetBSD. They also don't know it's
the oldest of the three *BSDs. NetBSD is more concerned
with themselves, their quality, and getting their jobs done,
than they are with making a lot of noise.

Debian tends to be the same way, in my oppinion. They have
no commercial backer, they have no publicists or marketing
people, and they aren't well known among the media or
public. They don't try to be the 'end all, be all'
distribution for everyone. Instead, they quietly work
towards making their distribution as good as they possibly
can, for what they want to do with it.

This is the first time I've heard someone claim that Debian
users looked down on Red Hat users. The few times I've
heard that complaint, it was usually FreeBSD users looking
down on Linux people, or Slackware people looking down on
Distro-With-Package-Managers people. Or, more often than
either of those, it's Linux people looking down on Windows
people. Luckily, not everyone is like that. Let's all try
to remember not to look down on others as well.

Life....

Okay, in other news, I only slept for an hour and a half
last night. (The joy of finishing a 20 page group report,
doing 2-3 page reaction paper, and then reading nearly 5
chapters and studying for a test at 9am this morning.)
Needless to say, I'm rather exhausted, so I'm going to bed.
G'Night everyone. ;-)

Spent a good portion of the day Scheming. The
language
was
something of a mindflip at first, since most of my
experience is with imperative languages, but I'm really
starting to like it now. I think I'm definitely going to
play with it more in the future.

Ponderings....

I'm thinking of resurecting my old popcheck
program. It
was
a simple command line program that connected to a pop server
and told you if you had any e-mail. If you did, it would
tell you how many, who from, the dates they were received,
and the subject lines. I'm thinking about rewriting it, as
I first wrote it when I barely knew what I was doing.

I'm also considering rewriting it in alternate
langauges.
It was originally written in C....I'm thinking it might be
fun to rewrite it in C++ and Perl. A good learning
experience, and it might also be helpful for others to see
how a program can be implemented in various languages.

Curious...

One thing I Just noticed about this
site, is that I seem
to
have lost my 'certification'. Last time I was here, I was
certified as a Journeyer. Now I'm not showing myself
certified as anything when I check my page, and the full
listing shows me as an Observer. I have a couple people
who've certified me as Apprentice (people I don't even know,
interestingly enough) and a few more who certified me as
Journeyer. Seems odd. Everything looks like it should
check out. Oh, well, prolly just a little bug
or something.

Spent most of the day learning Scheme. It's definitely something of a mindflip when all your previous experience
is
with standard procedural programming languages. It's fun, though. I'm starting to get the hang of it, I think.

Gonna try to put some work into popcheck later (description and info on it posted then).